Punjabi re-mix

There was an inevitability about Sukhbir Badal’s election last week in Amritsar as president of the Shiromani Akali Dal, in place of his father, Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal. By all accounts, the passing of power from father to son was a smooth affair. In fact, the principle of dynastic succession is now normalised in the SAD, once proud of its inner party democracy. Other senior leaders of the party have also lined up their own sons and nephews for future power play. Badal junior’s anointment as party supremo could be the signal, then, for Punjab’s ‘kaka ji’ brigade, which cornered a handsome chunk of the tickets in assembly elections last year, to climb centrestage. Yet, even in this predictable moment, as a dog-eared script plays out in Punjab, there just might be possibilities.

For too long in Punjab, politics has been burdened by the same syndromes and blood feuds. Last year, when the SAD came to power in the state in alliance with the BJP, it seemed to promise a change of subject. The emphasis in that campaign, widely perceived to have been crafted by Sukhbir, was on development. But the new government was soon mired in the Dera Sacha Sauda controversy and old faultlines on ‘panthic’ issues were being stoked again. Once again, it seemed that the mainstream party would allow extremist players, for long relegated to the fringe, to wrest the political initiative. It didn’t happen, but before the crisis fortunately passed, it framed a mismatch in Punjab — between its ordinary people who are ready to turn fully to face the future, and its politicians who are unwilling to let go of a politics of resentment and insecurity that they have profiteered from in the past.

As the baton is passed on to a new generation in the Akali Dal, then, this is the hope: that the younger politician, less burdened by old habits, will renew the leader’s pact with the led. That, despite the constraints of family rule, political spaces will be opened up to admit issues that affect the voter who may remember Punjab’s lost decade to terror, but refuses to be imprisoned by it.